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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/terrall08282008.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/terrall08282008.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2>August 28, 2008<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>"All the
Time We are Hungry and Now We Have No One" <br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
Return to Port-au-Prince
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By BEN TERRALL
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">A</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>s I flew from JFK to Port-au-Prince Airport
on August 11, a fellow journalist handed me the front section of that
day’s New York Times with a laugh. My friend pointed to a passage
in an article about Russia’s war with Georgia that had prompted her
bitter chuckling.<br><br>
The piece quoted Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad of the United States, who
charged that the Russian foreign minister had told Secretary of State
Condoleeza Rice “that the democratically elected president of Georgia
‘must go.’” Khalizad described the Russian’s comment as “completely
unacceptable.”<br><br>
Of course, Washington’s posturing as a beacon of peace and freedom has
become increasingly more ludicrous as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
continue with no end in sight and Bush explains that we do not torture
while testimony to the contrary accumulates around the globe. But
the U.S. role in supporting the February 29, 2004 rightist coup in Haiti
makes the hypocrisy of Khalizad’s statement especially galling.
<br><br>
The Bush Administration made it clear that Haiti’s democratically-elected
president Jean-Bertrand Aristide had to go, then flew him to the Central
African Republic under U.S. Marine Guard (as detailed in Randall
Robinson’s excellent book <i>An Unbroken Agony</i>) as a brutal
right-wing military takeover seized Aristide’s homeland. The coup
government, UN forces, and anti-Aristide paramilitaries killed around
4,000 people in the next two years, according to a study published in the
prestigious British medical journal The Lancet.<br><br>
Among the many pro-Aristide activists who were forced into exile was the
grassroots leader Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine. Lovinsky, a key figure
in the Port-au-Prince base of Aristide’s Lavalas movement, returned to
Haiti during the apparent democratic opening after the 2006 election of
President Rene Preval. <br><br>
I saw Lovinsky speak in July 2007 at a demonstration across from the
headquarters of MINUSTAH, the UN mission in Haiti. The occasion was
the anniversary of the 1915 U.S. marine takeover of the island
nation. Lovinsky led a spirited crowd of around 50 Haitians, many
elderly. The psychologist-turned-activist forcefully read out a
bill of indictment against the UN: MINUSTAH’s legitimizing the 2004
coup by replacing the initial wave of U.S., French, and Canadian troops,
and propping up an illegal government; UN troops engaging in massacres of
unarmed civilians; and carrying out a modern-day colonial
occupation of Haiti. As a few reporters and activists taped
audio or shot video of this fiery speech, across Ave. John Brown at the
UN entrance a mix of uniformed and plainclothes military representing a
handful of the countries participating in MINUSTAH clicked away on
digital cameras pointed at Lovinsky. This seemed a tactic of
intimidation, given the close operations the UN has conducted with the
notoriously brutal Haitian police (as documented in reports from Harvard
Law School and the University of Miami Law School). A few weeks
later, Lovinsky was abducted after meeting with a human rights delegation
from the U.S. He hasn’t been heard from since.<br><br>
August 12 was the one year anniversary of Lovinsky’s disappearance.
I walked with a sinking feeling to the demonstration commemorating the
sad day. It was hard to believe such an impressive, committed
figure had been missing for an entire year. Between 150 and 200
demonstrators, many wearing t-shirts bearing Lovinsky’s likeness, marched
in a circle around the statue of a man holding aloft a dove in the center
of the Plaza of the Martyrs. Aristide built the monument in memory
of the thousands killed in the first (U.S.-backed) coup against him of
1991-1994.<br><br>
Lavalas activist Rene Civil, imprisoned on trumped-up charges in 2006 but
freed under a conditional release after an international campaign on his
behalf, addressed the crowd. He said that Lovinsky’s disappearance
was a threat to Lavalas supporters, intended to stop them from struggling
for Aristide’s return. <br><br>
As the demonstration wound through downtown Port-au-Prince, several
police vehicles followed. Police had already blocked off streets
near the Plaza of Martyrs, which protest organizers claimed was done to
discourage more people from participating. The police
presence as the march ended in front of the National Palace was low-key,
but a jeep with six heavily armed Brazilian troops was a bit more
hostile. I took photos of them as one of them photographed me.
<br><br>
The next day I returned to the Palace of the Martyrs, where the September
30th Foundation, a group co-founded by Lovinsky to support reparations
and justice for victims of the 1991 coup, holds a protest at 11am every
Wednesday. Since their leader (one member told me, “we see Lovinsky
as a father and a brother”) has been abducted the primary focus of the
weekly action has been calling for the safe return of Lovinsky.<br><br>
Edwidge (for her safety, a pseudonym), a woman participating in the
protest, told me “Lovinsky used to help us. All the time we’re
hungry, now we have no one.” She continued, “Lovinsky was not a
criminal. We know when the wealthy are kidnapped the government
does everything it can to recover the victim. Lovinsky is not a
dog, not an animal. He deserves the same treatment as the wealthy
people. Give us a report. If he’s dead, give us the bones and
we’ll bury him.”<br><br>
Many of his supporters hold out hope that their sorely-missed friend is
alive. The forty present at the Wednesday protest sang political
lyrics set to traditional evangelical tunes (and, in at least one
instance, a vodou song). One roughly translated as “The victims are
asking for the key/ give us the key so we can open the door of justice/
who are we asking for? Lovinsky!”<br><br>
In an interview later that day, human rights lawyer Mario Joseph of the
Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) told me that in some ways the
current Preval Administration is “worse than the interim [coup]
government.” Joseph said he told the Haitian ambassador in
Washington, “your government needs to launch an investigation … [but] on
Lovinsky, they don’t want to do anything.” Joseph argues, “The Preval
government continues the policies of the Latortue [coup] government,” and
says most of those now in power are holdovers from the illegal 2004-2006
government.<br><br>
(A Lavalas activist who has worked with Aristide since 1984 and who was
diplomatic about Preval, told me, “on the social and economic plane, we
can work with him.” But this member of the National Cell for the
Reflection of the Grassroots, who was beaten so badly he had to be
hospitalized in prison under the 2004-2006 regime, said all “ministers,
ambassadors, and delegates” left over from the coup period are
“criminals” who should be fired.)<br><br>
Joseph’s family has had to relocate to Miami because of death
threats. Noting that human rights abusers he helped put behind bars
under Aristide had escaped prison after 2004, the lawyer said, “They need
to arrest people escaped from jail. My life is in danger.”<br><br>
Meanwhile, Joseph remains extremely busy defending prisoners, some of
whom have been moved to outlying regions he has a hard time getting
to. Of the political prisoners still behind bars, he said, “I have
too much work to do, it’s hard to keep track,” but that there “were more
than 100.” Most high profile Lavalas figures have been freed but
many less well-known progressive activists remain locked down.
Joseph explained, they “had contact with the Lavalas movement, that’s why
they’re in jail.” Some think the number of political prisoners is
higher, given the many poor people picked up in sweeps of “popular,” or
pro-Lavalas, neighborhoods. (The majority of inmates in the
country’s overcrowded prisons have still not seen a judge, though the
Haitian constitution stipulates that all prisoners must have access to a
judge within 48 hours of their arrest.) Joseph stressed the “really
vague” nature of charges made in such sweeps. “They accused kids of
being gang members, bandits, and of ‘association with malefactors,’ the
same techniques as under [former dictator] Duvalier.”<br><br>
Joseph filed a rape complaint against Sri Lankan soldiers accused of
sexually abusing Haitian girls, but there was no prosecution. The
Sri Lankans were shipped home. To add insult to injury, the UN
presence has had a harshly inflationary effect on rents and other basic
expenses. UN SUVs are in evidence throughout exclusive
Port-au-Prince gated communities, but UN money doesn’t trickle down to
many of the country’s poor majority, who are having a harder and harder
time surviving. Several street vendors perched in a heavily flooded
corner of an outdoor market in the city’s Lasaline neighborhood told me
the cost of a cup of rice had doubled since the capital’s food riots of
April. The vendors could no longer save anything, and had no idea
how they were going to scrape together enough to pay school fees for
their kids in September. In the stagnant water at their feet parasites
were visible. A health care worker later confirmed a huge number of
kids have worms in their bodies.<br><br>
<b>Ben Terrall</b> is a freelance writer living in San Francisco. He can
be reached at:
<a href="mailto:bterrall@gmail.com">bterrall@gmail.com</a><br><br>
<br><br>
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